Amazon will release sequel to best-seller

February 14, 2009|ROB PEGORARO The Washington Post

There's a new Kindle, but chances are you still can't get one. Amazon this week unveiled the successor to its much-buzzed about, hard-to-find and seldom seen electronic-book reader that debuted in November 2007. The Seattle online retailer says this wireless-connected tablet, which has been on back order since the Christmas season, features a wide variety of upgrades over Kindle 1.0: -It's thinner. At 0.36 inches thick, it's about a pencil's width. -The screen displays 16 shades of gray and, Amazon says, flips from page to page 20 percent faster. -The battery should last 25 percent longer. -It offers far more storage, with 1.4 gigabytes available versus just 180 megabytes on the first Kindle. -It includes a five-way controller that directly selects items on the screen (on the first Kindle, you have to roll a jog-dial switch to move an indicator up or down in a thermometer-like column to the right of the screen). -And it has a text-to-speech feature that can read a book aloud to you (though you can also buy audible audiobooks, which feature human readers who will sound far better than the obviously synthesized voice you hear in Amazon's video demo). The debut of a new Kindle had been rumored for months, with bloggers posting pictures of what the new model might look like. Analysts have speculated that nearly 200,000 Kindles have been sold, but Amazon says it does not keep track of such information. What company officials will say is that those customers who were waiting for Kindle 1 to ship will get Kindle 2. Amazon carries more than 230,000 titles for the Kindle (up from 90,000 at the device's debut), most selling at $9.99 each. It also stocks a far smaller inventory of newspapers (just 31) and magazines (a mere 22). You can also, of course, read any of the 27,000 public-domain books collected by Project Gutenberg after converting them to the Kindle's proprietary format. Those last two words constitute my biggest hangup with the whole e-book concept. The original Kindle already had substantial advantages over competing e-book readers from Sony and others -- most importantly, its ability to download titles on the go in a minute or so using Sprint's wireless-data service. But all those titles come wrapped up in "digital rights management" software that keeps you from treating a Kindle e-book like a physical book. That, among other things, means you can't loan a Kindle title to a friend, donate it to a charity or sell it at a used-book store. You can't even read it on anything but a Kindle (though Amazon's news release vaguely promises that "Kindle 2 will also sync with a range of mobile devices in the future"). The new Kindle, still selling for $359, will ship on Feb. 24.